Colloquium on Comparative Constitutional Law and Politics

This Colloquium features scholars whose work interrogates, stretches, and reimagines the boundaries in the study of constitutionalism. Their thinking is informed by various perspectives and methodologies, including comparative, doctrinal, empirical, historical, and theoretical. Papers presented in this Colloquium focus on the major concerns of our time in relation to constitutional democracy, the separation of powers, and the rule of law. Faculty and students across the University are invited to attend. This Colloquium is one of many initiatives organized in partnership with the International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism.

Justin Collings is Professor of Law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University where he teaches constitutional law and torts. He is the author of Democracy’s Guardians: A History of the German Federal Constitutional Court, 1951-2001 (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Scales of Memory: Constitutional Justice and the Burdens of the Past (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2020). He holds doctorates in law and history from Yale and clerked for the Honorable Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Julie Chi-hye Suk is dean for master’s programs and professor of Sociology, Political Science,
and Liberal Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) – The Graduate Center. She is a
scholar of comparative law and society, with a focus on women in comparative constitutional
law. Her scholarship brings a global constitutional perspective to the new efforts to ratify the
Equal Rights Amendment in the United States. Her book on these themes, We the Women: The
Forgotten Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment, will be published in 2020.

Professor Suk has authored dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters in law reviews and
peer-reviewed journals. Prior to joining The Graduate Center, Dr. Suk was a law professor for
13 years at Cardozo Law School in New York, with visiting professorships at the law schools of
Harvard, Columbia, University of Chicago, and UCLA. She has lectured widely in the United
States and Europe, and has been a visiting fellow at the European University Institute in
Florence and LUISS-Guido Carli in Rome. In addition to master’s and doctoral degrees in politics
from Oxford University, she holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and an A.B. in English and French
Literature from Harvard University.

She has served as the section chair of the Association of American Law Schools’ sections on
Employment Discrimination, Comparative Law, and European Law. She is on the Board of the
National Center for Access to Justice.

October 15, 2019 Tuesday

Michael Pal is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa and one of Canada’s leading experts on the law of democracy and comparative constitutional law. He has a J.D. and a doctorate from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, where he was a Trudeau Foundation Scholar, and an LL.M in Legal Theory from NYU. He is currently at work on a manuscript on the comparative constitutional politics of election commissions. He was the constitutional advisor for Ontario’s recent campaign finance reforms and is active advising election commissions and constitutional drafters in Asia and Africa.

November 5, 2019 Tuesday

Professor Yvonne Tew writes and teaches in the areas of constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, and religion and law. Prior to joining the Georgetown Law faculty, she taught at Columbia Law School as an Associate-in-Law and was a Hauser Global Research Fellow at the New York University School of Law. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Professor Tew received her first law degree from the University of Cambridge graduating with Double First Class Honors in 2007 and completed her Master of Laws (LL.M.) from Harvard Law School. Her scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in the Virginia Journal of International Law, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Washington International Law Journal, American Journal of Comparative Law, Cambridge Law Journal, and in several book collections published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Edward Elgar Publishing.

November 12, 2019 Tuesday

David Landau Mason Ladd Professor and Associate Dean for International Programs, Florida State University

Professor David Landau is the Mason Ladd Professor and Associate Dean for International Programs at Florida State University College of Law. He is the co-author, with Manuel Jose Cepeda Espinosa, of Colombian Constitutional Law, co-editor, with David Bilchitz, of The Evolution of the Separation of Powers, and co-editor with Hanna Lerner of Comparative Constitution-Making. He has published in various journals including the University of Chicago Law Review, the Iowa Law Review, and the Harvard Journal of International Law. Since 2012, he has been a founding editor of IConnect, the blog of the International Journal of Constitutional Law.

Professor Rivka Weill of the Harry Radzyner Law School, IDC, was a Visiting Law Professor at Cardozo Law School (2016-2017), David R. Greenbaum and Laureine Knight Greenbaum Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at University of Chicago Law School (Fall 2017) and Visiting Law Professor at Yale Law School (Spring 2018). In recent years, she received three times the IDC’s “Best Researcher in Law School” award (2012, 2015, 2017) as well as the IDC’s “Best Lecturer in Law School” award (2010). Her work focuses on constitutional law as well as administrative law with a focus on theoretical and comparative dimensions.